Klarna, a leading global retail bank, payments, and shopping service today announced the launch of its Virtual Shopping offering, bringing the best of in-store to the online experience. Virtual Shopping by Klarna enables consumers to browse and buy online with confidence by connecting them directly with in-store experts through live chats and video calls to receive product advice and inspiration. For retailers, Virtual Shopping empowers in-store teams to bring their expertise beyond the walls of physical stores to millions of shoppers online. By using the new merchant-facing Klarna Store App, in-store teams can share photos and videos of items and demo products live directly from the store floor, from home or even from emerging dark store concepts. This in turn drives brand engagement and loyalty while reducing return rates. The launch builds upon the successful acquisition of Hero, a social shopping platform and leader in virtual shopping services, last year. 

While online shopping has risen to new heights in recent years, in-store shopping remains the dominant channel, accounting for nearly 80% of global retail sales in 2021. Klarna’s Shopping Pulse Report* revealed that consumers favor shopping in physical stores because of the social interaction and level of customer service they offer. Unlike shopping in-store, the online experience today does not allow consumers to see a product up close, touch or try on items, making it hard to tell if products are true to size, fit or color. Consumers today are looking for the same level of assistance when shopping online, with over three-quarters (80%) of shoppers believing that retailers need to invest in new technology, while more than a third of those think that offering more personalized services (32%) and product recommendations (39%) is a priority for retailers.

Klarna’s Virtual Shopping tools are already live today with over 300 brands, including Levi’s, Hugo Boss and Herman Miller, transforming online stores into a true omnichannel experience. Consumers can shop anything from sneakers to sofas without ever stepping foot in-store, but still receive expert guidance from in-store teams to help consumers in their purchasing decisions. Through live video and messaging, consumers can view photos and videos of items up close and watch live product demos directly from the store floor - demonstrating everything from how a piece of clothing fits off the rack to the color of a cosmetic product or the size of a piece of furniture. 

Klarna is now making Virtual Shopping available to partnered retailers worldwide, serving as the ultimate online shopping companion to consumers and strengthening Klarna’s position as a global growth partner to its retailers. By giving consumers greater confidence in their purchasing decision, the service markedly improves performance for merchants, with consumers up to 21x more likely to make a purchase after speaking with an in-store expert online compared to when left unassisted, while also increasing customer lifetime value. 

David Sandström, Chief Marketing Officer at Klarna: “At Klarna, we want to provide the world’s best shopping experience - whether that is online or in-store. In the past, online shopping has been missing a key element: human interaction. With Virtual Shopping, we replicate the brick-and-mortar experience of receiving personalized advice from an in-store expert and bring it to the online realm. This will empower our partnered retailers around the world to bring their online stores to life and build customer relationships that last.”

How does Virtual Shopping work?

• For shoppers: Shoppers connect with an in-store expert when they click the Virtual Shopping icon on integrated stores from the retailer’s website. Once connected, they can chat, receive photos and videos, follow product recommendations, and even have a two-way video chat, recreating the experience they would receive in-store. 
• For retailers: Retailers integrated with Klarna can easily add Virtual Shopping to their online stores to deliver a true omnichannel experience. Once enabled, they can gain insights into shopper interactions and sales, enabling them to improve overall performance. To connect with online shoppers, in-store experts can now use the new, merchant facing Klarna Store App for iOS and Android. Once connected, they can begin engaging with consumers by text, chat and video, making it easy to provide personalized recommendations, schedule in-store appointments, and stay in touch.

Klarna’s Virtual Shopping offering is live today in 18 markets, including the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, France, Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Sweden. The offering will extend to additional markets in 2022. 

ACI Worldwide, the global leader in mission-critical, real-time payments software, and NORBr, the leading global payment services distributor platform for digital merchants, and leading payment services marketplace for digital merchants, have announced a partnership. The collaboration allows merchants to connect to ACI’s merchant solutions, including ACI Secure eCommerce, and ACI Fraud Management for Merchants.
 
NORBr connects merchants with certified payments providers, managing and benchmarking all payment services through a single API, for free. The company offers a no-code routing engine to send transactions to the most relevant payment service providers.️
 
ACI solutions available via the NORBr Marketplace include:
 
 • ACI Secure eCommerce - Holistic payments platform that combines a powerful payments gateway offering merchants access to an extensive global payments network, fraud management and full support for compliance with strong customer authentication requirements under PSD2
 
 • ACI Omni-Commerce - Secure omni-channel payment processing platform that supports merchant’s in-store, online and mobile needs, offering support for multiple card payment types (credit, debit, prepaid, EMV and contactless), global schemes (Apple Pay and Google Pay) and alternative payment methods (PayPal, Klarna, iDEAL, Alipay, etc.)
 
 • ACI Fraud Management for Merchants - Real-time, multi-layered fraud management solution to meet the requirements of eCommerce merchants and payment service providers (PSPs)
 
“We are delighted to work with NORBr allowing merchants in Europe, and in France in particular, easy access to ACI’s award-winning merchant payment solutions,” commented Nigel Reavley, country manager – France, ACI Worldwide. “ACI’s merchant solutions give thousands of merchants and PSPs globally the tools and technology to increase conversion rates and grow their businesses, by making payments part of a smooth, seamless and secure customer journey.”
 
“Against the backdrop of rising eCommerce transactions in Europe and worldwide, we are delighted to welcome global payments giant ACI Worldwide to our payment network,” commented Janelle Sha, EVP Strategy and Growth, NORBr. “Our unique marketplace connects digital merchants with payment providers, to ensure order fulfillment from the merchant's website wherever their customers are located.️ It allows merchants to focus on their business, increase conversion rates and ultimately drive revenues.”

Nebulon, the pioneer of smartInfrastructure, an infrastructure operations SaaS that transforms an on-premises server estate into a cloud operating platform, today announced 4-minute ransomware recovery on Lenovo^TM ThinkSystem rack server edge deployments. With this announcement, Nebulon provides enterprises with a Lenovo-based 2-server cluster alternative for their edge data centres with near-instant recovery capabilities. This solution occupies a 33% smaller physical footprint equating to a one-third cost reduction as compared to 3-node-minimum hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions, which can take hours or even days to fully recover from ransomware attacks.

The edge data centre market is expected to grow from $7.2 billion in 2021 to $19.1 billion by 2026.* The edge comes with an increased risk of both unwanted physical and network access to edge deployments. Beyond phishing and drive-by download scams, physical access is often more difficult to monitor across remote and distributed edge locations. A server can be infected with malware due to a reason as simple as a door or closet being left unlocked or ajar, for example. With ransomware, malware, and wiper attacks on the rise, administrators are redoubling their efforts to secure the edge. Cyber resilience for infrastructure at the edge is a must-have. When the worst happens, it is critical for companies to have solutions in place that incorporate remotely controlled, rapid ransomware recovery. 

Lenovo ThinkSystem rack servers offer the value, flexibility, and efficiency to meet critical demands at the enterprise edge. With today’s announcement of Nebulon TimeJump for Lenovo rack servers, that value now also includes rapid cyber recovery and a 33% smaller footprint at the edge. Nebulon TimeJump is the first and only Lenovo server and storage solution offering complete ransomware recovery in less than four minutes, and it is available for small 2-server high-availability clusters, providing significant savings with a comparable level of availability versus 3-node minimum HCI solutions. 

Nebulon TimeJump builds on Nebulon’s smartInfrastructure cloud control plane, Nebulon ON, which uses multi-factor authentication (MFA) to prevent unauthorised login—a feature enabled for every user that cannot be turned off. Additionally, Nebulon ON enforces integrated role-based access control (RBAC), so organisations have a firm handle on who has local or remote access to the operating environment and data. smartInfrastructure further strengthens data security with always-on encryption for data at-rest and in-flight, enabled by a hardware-generated encryption key versus a user-generated one, which minimises the risk of human error.

“Data at the edge faces higher security risks and cost pressures than core data centre deployments,” said Nebulon CEO Siamak Nazari. “With Nebulon, enterprises can reduce costs while improving cyber resilience at the edge—and if attacked by ransomware, they can recover in under four minutes.”

Watch the webinar to learn more about TimeJump, Nebulon’s ransomware recovery solution.

Visit Nebulon at Lenovo Accelerate May 16 to May 19 at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas.

Pello Capital is a wealth management and stockbroking firm, which revolutionised processes and services to vastly improve customer and employee experiences. The traditionally slow-moving industry is often hampered by antiquated technology which leaves it struggling to innovate. Since buying out the company in 2017, CEO Daniel Gee and his partner Nick Josh have modernised the company, turning the industry on its head, while driving fast growth and profitability. 

A core part of Pello Capital's transformation was achieved through its use of Zoho One, Zoho's entire suite of digital tools. It quickly became integral to Pello’s business operations, with the company using Creator, CRM, Forms, Flow, Cliq, WorkDrive, Analytics, Desk, Sign, Projects, People and Expenses to run many daily aspects of its business, increasing efficiency, while also helping enable industry compliance.

Pello has seen significant return on investment. It has scaled hugely with the help of Zoho tools, with customers rising from 200 to over 10,500, and with just under 3,000 active users. Its assets under management began at £35m and hit over £750m in 2021. It is now handling 25-30k annual transactions in its trading department and has gone from 30m to three quarters of a billion assets in two years. 

Customer experience has improved with two new digital apps powered by Zoho and further innovation in customer and prospect engagement. Pello now matchmakes its customers to investments, acting as a marketplace, using data stored in Zoho CRM.

Zoho easily integrated with other software, bringing together data from all sources for analysis, delivering real-time key business metrics, and improving quality of information to act on. It prompts earlier actions to maximise opportunities or reduce potential challenges.

Pello switched from several alternative providers across other aspects of its business to Zoho as it realised the value it could gain for no additional cost, with all apps under one price-point per user. This delivered significant savings and reduced the time needed to manage and maintain multiple supplier relationships and contracts.

Daniel Gee custom-built several customer applications using Zoho Creator and Zoho's own scripting language, Deluge (alongside traditional CSS, JS node and Javascript). This includes Pello Spotlight, a corporate application, and Pello Marketplace, a retail consumer app which has already successfully transacted over £500m in investor applications in 2021, and has recently launched to the general public.

Pello recognises it is still in the early stages of transforming its business with Zoho. It will expand its use of Zoho's applications to further improve efficiency, customer experience, employee experience, productivity and marketing. It also plans to completely migrate to cloud-based solutions.

It will analyse customer sentiment and drive action to boost customer experience, further automate marketing, drive more efficiency and productivity and offer faster customer resolutions. It plans to introduce further Zoho tools to enhance customer outcomes faster.  

Pello will continue to use Zoho to help it present a modern alternative in the industry which offers a markedly superior customer experience as it pursues further success.

CyberArk, the global leader in Identity Security, today announced the launch of CyberArk Ventures – a $30 million global investment fund designed to empower the next generation of disruptors solving complex security challenges with innovative technology. CyberArk has initially aligned with four Venture Capital investors: Venrock, YL Ventures, Team8 Capital and Merlin Ventures. CyberArk Ventures also announced today that it has completed initial investments in three cybersecurity start-ups:

• Dig Security: Provides real-time threat detection solutions for data assets hosted in public clouds
• Enso Security: Application Security Posture Management
• Zero Networks: A leading provider of identity-based microsegmentation

As the complexity of enterprise IT environments expands and the threat of cyber attacks increase, the focus on protecting endpoints, networks, applications and data – wherever they reside – from unauthorised and/or unintended access has become more important than ever.

“We’re seeking innovative security start-ups that are solving difficult problems for their customers,” said Udi Mokady, founder, chairman and CEO, CyberArk. “Our first three investments are the trifecta – network security, application security and data security. CyberArk Ventures is a natural evolution of our business strategy – giving CyberArk an exciting opportunity to support the next wave of cybersecurity innovators and nurture an expanded ecosystem of trail blazers.”

In addition to funding, CyberArk Ventures provides portfolio companies with go-to-market support, access to CyberArk technology and CyberArk Labs research, engagement with CyberArk leadership, and networking opportunities with prospective partners and customers. CyberArk Ventures also offers nascent companies guidance and feedback to improve their product design in hopes of making the product enterprise-ready, while introducing them to valuable channel and design partners.

Supporting quotes:

“We take great pride in helping entrepreneurs tackle hard problems,” said Todd Graham, vice president, Venrock. “Venrock brings with it years of real-world experience and a passion to help build some of the world’s most disruptive, successful companies. And CyberArk's engagement, network, passion and experience will give these start-ups an advantage in the market.”

“As singular cybersecurity investors ourselves, our collaborative relationship with CyberArk comes naturally,” said Ofer Schreiber, partner at YL Ventures. “We both have extensive experience with guiding cybersecurity innovators with go-to-market in their start-up journey and helping them grow into tomorrow’s global industry leaders, much like CyberArk did as a cybersecurity trailblazer.”

“Too often, entrepreneurs face limited reach to end customers and lack access to resources and specialized talent. These are challenges that capital alone can’t solve,” said Liran Grinberg, co-founder and managing partner, Team8. “Our relationship with CyberArk will help support technology companies for predictable, long-term success. Working with CyberArk on both product and go-to-market puts companies on the fast track to become category leaders.”

“Merlin’s work with CyberArk began as a channel partner, so we have confidence that this relationship with CyberArk Ventures will be a strong fit,” said Seth Spergel, managing partner at Merlin Ventures. “As security subject matter experts, we understand how enterprise sales work and how to execute successful go-to-market strategies that create value for start-ups looking to rapidly penetrate and scale in the U.S. market.”

For more information on CyberArk Ventures, please visit https://www.cyberark.com/cyberark-ventures.

Phrasee, the leader in brand language optimisation, has today announced an exclusive European partnership with Visa, a world leader in digital payments. The three-year agreement is part of Visa’s strategic investment in its clients, which include Europe’s leading B2B financial services brands. Visa clients will have access to Phrasee’s advanced natural language generation and machine learning technology as part of its reseller programme.

The new reseller agreement means that Visa clients can now generate and optimise the marketing language they use across the full customer journey to ensure the highest level of engagement at every touchpoint. Financial services brands will now be able to connect to the right people at the right time with authentic, relevant, and compliant brand language - helping them win, retain and grow customers. Phrasee delivers an average 19% uplift in engagement rates for financial services brands.

Parry Malm, CEO at Phrasee, commented: “We love working with enterprise brands who move at a fast pace, are super-focused on the role tech plays in transforming commercial outcomes, and are really collaborative. Visa is a brilliant example of all of these things. We have a shared vision of how AI can transform marketing outcomes and are thrilled to be partnering with the team to empower Visa’s network of incredible clients in Europe.”

‘‘Phrasee’s track record of working with some of the largest brands across the financial services industry makes it a strong fit for our European clients,’’ said Hussaan Karim, Digital Client Marketing Manager at Visa. “Our commitment is to ensure our clients have access to the very best technology and services and Phrasee will be supporting us with this mission.”

Phrasee is an AI-powered SaaS platform that uses advanced machine learning techniques, natural language generation and deep learning capabilities to enhance brand language in real-time. It allows brands to generate, optimise, automate and analyse language in their own brand voice. Phrasee’s products cover all digital channels ensuring a consistent customer experience.

Digital bank Chase has today introduced a refer-a-friend offer, rewarding existing customers with £20 when they successfully refer family and friends to open a Chase current account.

New customers who have been referred to Chase, and deposited a minimum of £20 into their account within 30 days, will also receive £20.

Customers will be able to retrieve their unique referral link from within the Chase app to share with family and friends. With many customers already making the most of Chase’s everyday rewards programme, the new initiative will help customers to easily share and recommend the Chase account.

Deborah Keay, Chief Marketing Officer of Chase in the UK, said: “The new refer-a-friend offer is just a small token from us to reward our customers and make it easy for them to share and recommend the Chase experience to their family and friends. With our new refer-a-friend offer and the recent launch of the Chase Saver, customers banking with Chase can enjoy one of the most competitive current accounts on the market".

This new addition is the latest in a number of features from Chase aimed at offering a rewarding banking experience to customers. Chase most recently launched a new savings option with a competitive interest rate of 1.5% AER*, alongside 1% cashback on everyday debit card spending and 5% AER interest on small change roundups.

Customers can open a current account in minutes via the simple and intuitive app and for any questions, customers can connect to a customer support specialist, with just a few taps in the Chase app – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

CellPoint Digital a leading global provider of digital commerce and payment solutions, is one of 11 startups that has been accepted into Plug and Play Tech Centre’s Travel accelerator program.

Plug and Play is an innovation platform that connects start-ups, corporations, venture capital firms, universities and government agencies. Since 2006, it has been accelerating start-ups by matching them with corporate clients and investing in them. The dedicated Plug and Play Fintech program launched in 2014.

As of 2021, Plug and Play has 70+ corporate partners, has made more than a hundred investments, and accelerated 600 start-ups. Last year, it accelerated over 2,500 companies and invested in 210.

The 2022 program will run over the next three months, during which time CellPoint Digital will be fully immersed in Plug and Play's global network of over 40,000 startups, 500 industry-leading corporate partners, and hundreds of venture capital firms and investors.

Melanie Siewert, Chief Marketing Officer, Global Head of Marketing, Brand and Design at CellPoint Digital said: “We are thrilled to be part of this forward-thinking, collaborative community. Plug and Play fast-tracks the innovation strategy of the world's largest financial institutions and by joining Plug and Play we will gain access to a vast network of start-ups which will further help us keep up with the latest industry trends.”

CellPoint Digital is now embarking on a range of networking events, mentoring sessions, dealflows, and will have the opportunity to evaluate the potential for pilots, POCs, investment, and other collaborations with the Plug and Play network.

Saeed Amidi, Founder and CEO of Plug and Play, said: “We believe technology has the power to make the world a better place and invest our time and resources into the entrepreneurs making a real impact. In past years, we've had many success stories come out of our programs, and I look forward to welcoming CellPoint Digital into this year’s program.”

Graduation for all of Plug and Play's Silicon Valley start-up batches will take place during Plug and Play's invite-only June Summit 2022, June 14-16.

For more details, visit https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/